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A User Dictionary is an auxiliary dictionary created by the user that contains words not included in the built-in dictionaries. Supplement the built-in dictionaries with a user dictionary to improve the quality of data capture. Typically, a user dictionary contains specialized terms, abbreviations, company names, and so on. You can set up and enable user dictionaries on the Languages tab of the Pre-recognition Properties dialog. To open this dialog, open the FlexiLayout or Classifier menu, click Properties, and then click the Advanced pre-recognition properties… button. Existing user dictionaries are listed in the User Dictionaries field with the following information:

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Create a custom dictionary

1

Open the Add New Dictionary dialog box

On the Languages tab of the Pre-recognition properties dialog, click Add….
2

Set the dictionary properties

A dictionary’s type and language cannot be changed after the dictionary is created.
3

Save the dictionary

Click OK. A dialog box opens, listing all the dictionary’s parameters.

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Edit a custom dictionary

To view or change a dictionary’s properties, select the dictionary and click Edit. The properties dialog has two tabs:
  • The General tab holds the dictionary’s name, type, language, and any comments. Only the name can be changed after the dictionary is created.
  • The Dictionary tab holds settings that depend on the dictionary’s type.

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Dictionary file dictionaries

A dictionary-file dictionary is based on a DIC file. To point to an existing file, click the Browse button button and specify its path. To create and populate a new file:
1

Create the dictionary file

Click Create new dictionary…, specify a name in the Create New Dictionary File dialog box, and click OK. The file is saved as a DIC file in the project folder.
2

Add and edit values in the editor

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Regular expression dictionaries

Specify the expression. Click the Expression editor button button to open a menu that helps you build the expression. For more information, see Alphabet used in regular expressions.
Words from a user dictionary have a higher priority than words from a built-in dictionary. Enabling the Prefer words from dictionary option further increases the priority of words from a dictionary.

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User alphabets

You can create a user alphabet in the Alphabet group on the Dictionary tab of a dictionary’s properties dialog. A user alphabet is a set of characters, separators, prefixes, and suffixes that may be used in a user dictionary. If a user alphabet is used together with a user dictionary, dictionary words that contain characters not in the user alphabet are treated as non-dictionary words. In other words, a user alphabet limits the set of characters permitted in custom dictionaries. To specify permitted characters, enable the Use custom alphabet option and specify the alphabet’s symbols in the text box, or click Edit to open the editor. To specify permitted separators, prefixes, suffixes, and ignored characters (collectively called punctuation marks), click the Advanced parameters button. In the Advanced custom alphabet parameters dialog box, specify the punctuation marks: In the Exclusion characters group of options, you can specify symbols to be ignored when words are checked against the user dictionary. For example, if you specify the regular expression +33NNNNNNNN and set the hyphen (-) as an ignored character, +33-11111111, +33-111-11-111, and +33-111-111-11 are all considered matches for the regular expression.